The “Los Angeles Declaration” is perhaps the greatest achievement of the US Summit, which has been undermined by differences over Biden’s invitation list. The leaders of Mexico and many Central American countries sent top diplomats instead after the US excluded Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela. A set of principles to be announced on Friday, the last day of the summit, includes legal entry into countries, assistance to communities most affected by immigration, humane border management and coordinated emergency response, a senior US official told reporters before. from an official announcement. . It is a plan already widely followed by Colombia and Ecuador, whose right-wing leaders have been warmly welcomed at the summit to welcome many of the 6 million people who have fled Venezuela in recent years. Ecuador President Guillermo Lasso last week announced a temporary regime for Venezuelans in his country, estimated at about 500,000. He told a news conference on Tuesday that his country had reciprocated the generosity of Spain and the United States, which welcomed large numbers of Ecuadorians who fled more than two decades ago. Colombian President Ivan Duce was applauded in an appearance Thursday to describe how his government has granted interim status to 1 million Venezuelans in the past 14 months and is processing another 800,000 applications. “We did it out of conviction,” Duque told the Associated Press, saying he could not be indifferent to Venezuelans who lost their homes and livelihoods and were ready to suffer acceptance rates. “They were invisible (in Colombia),” he said. “They could not open bank accounts, they could not work, they could not receive health care. “It was essentially a community without a future.” While the measures are not universally popular, the Venezuelans have assimilated them without serious reactions. “The two most dangerous phenomena are xenophobia and indifference, and I think we have managed to conquer both (in Colombia),” Duque said. The United States has been the most popular destination for asylum seekers since 2017, posing a challenge that has sidelined Biden and his immediate predecessors, Donald Trump and Barack Obama. But the US is not alone. Colombia and neighboring South America are home to millions of people who have fled Venezuela. Mexico filed more than 130,000 asylum applications last year, many of them Haitians, which has tripled since 2020. Many Nicaraguans are fleeing to Costa Rica, while displaced Venezuelans make up about one-sixth of the tiny Aruba population. US Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mallorca said on Thursday that the summit statement acknowledged the regional dimensions of immigration. “It’s a hemisphere challenge,” he said in an interview, citing Colombia, Ecuador and Costa Rica as hosting large numbers of immigrants. The answers of Colombia and Ecuador can not be reproduced, said Jose Samaniego, regional director of the UN refugee agency for America. Every country is different and immigration from Central America is more complicated than Venezuela. “You do not want to copy and paste,” he said, “but there are good practices.”
